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Seattle’s Beacon Food Forest is a Forager’s Dream

A diagram of the Beacon Food Forest, to be built in Seattle, where people can forage food for free.

Even the name makes me smile. A food forest. That’s what’s being created in the exciting city of Seattle where plans are afoot to turn a 7-acre public plot of land into a forest where people can pick all they want and forage to their heart and stomach’s content.

It’s called the Beacon Food Forest, and it would include fruit trees of all kinds and many other permanent vegetables, grapes, flowers and herbs. It’s right in the middle of a working class neighborhood called Beacon Hill in downtown Seattle.

Seattle public utilities donated the 7-acre plot and the 1.75 acre test zone will be planted by the end of the year. If this goes well more and more acres will be converted to food trees.

Now–what do you do about overzealous pickers? Those people you see at the buffet with groaning trays of ‘all they can eat?’

In true Seattle brilliant fashion they have this covered too. They plan to embed ‘thieves’ gardens” with extra plants in the park for those eager to take more than their share.

There will eventually be garden plots for urban dwellers to lease for $10 a year. Boy does this make sense–but it might be tough around here in February.

Max Hartshorne has been the editor of the GoNOMAD.com travel website since 2002. Over the past decade, he has had the privilege of working with writers and publishing travel articles about nearly every country in the world.
He has also been a consistent world traveler, writing hundreds of his own travel stories and posting daily blogs from the 10 or more yearly international trips he takes around the world.